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Friday, February 14, 1997
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Committee recommends education to stop AIDS
Legal restrictions hamper programs
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Clean needle exchanges, safe-sex education and drug abuse treatment are powerful weapons against the AIDS epidemic, but their effectiveness is being blocked by moral and government objections, a panel of experts concluded yesterday.
A committee selected by the National Institutes of Health cited strong scientific evidence that proved the effectiveness of behavior modification programs in slowing the AIDS epidemic.
The 12-member panel urged leaders at all governmental levels to change policies that prevent the use of what they called "lifesaving public health strategies."
The AIDS epidemic is a current and pressing public health emergency that can be lessened by behavior modification programs, said David Reiss, a doctor at George Washington University Medical Center and chairman of the study committee.
Reiss identified significant policy and legal barriers that must be removed in order for the interventions to protect the population from the spread of AIDS.
He said strong scientific evidence bore out that programs of safe-sex
education and clean needle exchanges were effective means to prevent the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, to the most susceptible populations.
"I completely reject this," said Robert L. Maginnis, senior policy analyst for the Family Research Council. He said evidence of how well needle exchanges and safe sex programs work remains inconclusive and often involves faulty science.
Reiss and his committee proposed an immediate change of regulations banning federal support of clean needle-exchange programs. "There is no valid scientific basis for such policies," said Reiss. "Thousands of lives are at risk if this ban is not removed."
In its report, the National Institutes on Health committee found that clean needle exchange programs in New Haven, Conn., and in Amsterdam did not lead to increased drug use, encourage young people to start using drugs or cause more needles to be discarded in public places.
Such programs did reduce — by 80 percent — the amount of needle sharing among drug users, the committee found, leading to an estimated 30 percent reduction in new HIV infections.
About 100 needle exchange programs are active in the United States, compared to 2,000 in Australia, a country with only one-tenth the U.S. population, the report said.
"Thousands of lives are at risk if this ban is not removed."
Dr.David Reiss chairman of AIDS study
maginnis said his studies showed that a needle exchange program in Connecticut had led to increased drug abuse, more discarded needles and a rise in petty crime in some neighborhoods.
A federal welfare law that permits only the teaching of abstinence in sex education also should be changed, said Reiss. It is not consistent with the scientific findings of effective teaching tools for young people on how to avoid an HIV infection, he said.
He said safe sex education, which can include recommending using condoms and limiting partners, was the most effective way to reduce the sexual spread of AIDS. A program among inner-city women, the report said, led to doubled use of condoms. And a study in Tanzania showed a 50 percent drop in the rate of HIV infection among young women after a condom distribution program began.
AIDS program has extra cash
$700,000 surplus stems from many bureacratic delays
The Associated Press
In 1995, the Missouri Health Department overspent by $1.6 million on AIDS care and had to cut services to help cover the deficit.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Money management problems in Missouri's AIDS programs are causing controversy for the second straight year. But this time, the problem is too much money.
Now the state program, funded through the federal Ryan White Care Act, is running a $700,000 surplus. State officials say they won't be able to distribute all the money by March 31, the end of the fiscal year.
"We think that is a disaster," said
Judy Moore-Nichols, director of the Kansas City Health Department's AIDS program. "It took them so long to get the money out, not because there wasn't a need or we couldn't supply the services. They didn't plan."
Missouri officials say the surplus left from the $3.1 million budget was the consequence of bureaucratic delays beyond their control.
"There was no complacency here," Wartman said. "We were as anxious as everyone else to make the dollars available."
Officials of local health agencies say they were able to plan for those funding changes, and the state ought to have done so too.
Advocates for AIDS patients contend the state could be spending its surplus now if it relaxed restrictions on its medications program.
The program pays for protease inhibitors, a recent breakthrough in AIDS treatment. Taken with
other drugs, protease inhibitors can reduce the amount of AIDS virus in patients' blood to undetectable levels.
The state has budgeted money to give protease inhibitors to 132 uninsured patients statewide. As of Tuesday, all those openings were filled. Any additional applicants will be placed on a waiting list.
"We have money that can be used that's sitting there," said David Peters, president of the Missouri AIDS Council, which represents AIDS service organizations. "I don't know why they're not moving on it."
The Kansas City Health Department estimates at that income level more than 150 patients in seven area counties might qualify for the drugs at some point in their illness.
Kansas, so far, has had no trouble keeping its Ryan White budget on track and has even expanded its drug program, said state health department representative Greg Crawford.
Shuttle crew catches Hubble after pursuing it for two days
Space telescope will be refurbished over the weekend
SPACE CENTER, Houston After a two-day pursuit, Discovery and its crew pulled alongside the Hubble Space Telescope early yesterday and captured the huge, gleaming observatory.
The Associated Press
Astronaut Steven Hawley reached out with the shuttle crane and latched onto the four-story-tall telescope as the two spacecraft sped in tandem at 17,500 mph, 370 miles above Mexico.
It was NASA's first look at Hubble since December 1993. Discovery's commander, Kenneth Bowersox, who was on the 1993 repair mission, assured Mission Control that Hubble looked the same.
"It's a beautiful sight," Bowersox said.
Mission Control congratulated the seven astronauts "for an outstanding rendezvous and a great capture."
"We went a little slow there at the end," Bowersox replied. "We just wanted to make the rendezvous last longer. It was so much fun."
The work to replace Hubble's worn-out components — the telescope has traveled 996 million miles
since its 1990 launch and circled Earth more than 37,000 times — began last night under the direction of lead space walker Mark Lee.
Both Lee and his astronaut wife, Jan Davis, who shared a 1992 shuttle trip, have long ties to Hubble.
Davis led a NASA engineering team that analyzed the structure of the telescope in the mid-1980s. She is monitoring her husband's mission from Houston, where she is training for her own shuttle flight this summer.
Lee helped develop the tools he and space walk partner Steven Smith will use to install new science instruments and other updated equipment on Hubble.
Lee is a 44-year-old Air Force colonel, four-time space flier and former fighter pilot who has specialized in space walks since becoming an astronaut in 1984. He also enjoys working with his hands and building things.
He escapes from Houston to his 300-acre cattle farm near Viroqua, Wis., every chance he gets. He built his own house there, not far from the mink farm where he grew up.
For Lee, driving a tractor alone in a field is every bit as satisfying and close to nature as soaring solo in a plane.
"I love to go back to the farm. You kind of go off and you plow a field, and you have an immediate sense of accomplishment," he said. "It's a lot
"We just wanted to make the rendezvous last longer. It was so much fun."
Kenneth Bowersox commander on Discovery
of the same thing here where you're going to go up and you work on something."
Lee attended a one-room school with a class of four. He was in the third grade when Alan Shepard became the first American in space in 1961. The boy decided immediately to become an astronaut, too.
Lee went on to the Air Force Academy, flew F-4S and F-18s and earned a master's degree in mechanical engineering, then went on to NASA.
He released the Magellan spacecraft into free flight during his first shuttle trip in 1989. A Japanese laboratory-research mission followed in 1992 with his wife. Lee and Davis already had begun training for the mission when they married, and NASA didn't want to break up the crew.
The Associated Press
LITCHFIELD PARK, Ariz. — OK, so maybe a dozen red roses and baby's breath in a tissue-lined box are more romantic than, say, a thorny bundle with roots wrapped in plastic from the garden shop at Wal-Mart.
"Those cut flowers will be dead in a few days," said Conklin, who harvests more than 2 million rose bushes a year
But if Henry Conklin and his fellow wholesale rose growers in the West had their way, husbands and boyfriends would be lugging home rose bushes for their valentines.
in his fields west of Phoenix. "Everybody like cut flowers, but buy a rose bush and you can grow those beautiful flowers yourself."
Though lawn and garden sales have grown about 10 percent annually during the past 10 years, rose bush sales have been virtually unchanged.
That's why Conklin and 18 other growers in Arizona, California and Oregon have joined in a $600,000 marketing campaign by the Garden Rose Council to promote the pleasures of tending roses.
One reason sales of rose bushes have been flat, said Conklin, the council's chairman, is the perception that roses are difficult to grow.
Dave Fox of Tempe, Ariz., recently tore out all eight of his thriving rose bushes.
"Roses are great the first year. After that you are continually pruning, fertilizing and spraying for aphids. They are a lot of work," he said.
Conklin conceded that growing roses takes a little more work. But on a stem-by-stem basis, there's no denying that rose bushes — at $2 and $3 at a Wal-Mart — are a better bargain than fresh-cut roses, which can cost a few dollars each.
The Associated Press
Twin births rise 42 percent in U.S.
which twins were born increased 30 percent during that period, from 18.9 babies per 1,000 births to 24.6.
ATLANTA — Twin births have climbed 42 percent since 1980 in the United States, largely because of fertility drugs, the government said yesterday.
Twin births rose from 68,339 babies in 1980 to 97,064 in 1994, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rate at
"A birth is more likely to result in twins than it was in the early 1980s," said CDC statistician Joyce Martin. She went on to explain that women are more likely to seek fertility therapies because they are more available.
give birth to twins increases until about age 40, she said. And as women grow older, their fertility decreases, and they are more likely to use fertility drugs.
the likelihood that a woman will
Twin rates were highest in the Northern and Eastern states. Connecticut and Massachusetts topped the list with a rate of 27.7 twin births per 1,000 births between 1992 and 1994.
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